Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Hide the difference

In the past decade, several thousand papers have been published on sex differences in the human brain. Many physical differences are genuine, but oftentimes not meaningful. Take for example, an easily measurable characteristic: size. One study recorded men’s brain volumes at 1,053 to 1,499 cubic centimeters and women’s at 975 to 1,398. The overlap means you couldn’t tell the sex of a random brain from its size.

In addition, many supposed psychological differences between the sexes are as illusory as the physical ones. In 2005, Janet Hyde, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzed data from studies of apparent sex differences in traits such as aggression, social ability, math, and moral reasoning. Nearly four fifths of the traits showed only a minor or negligible difference between men and women.

The blank-slaters are getting increasingly desperate. Now they're to the point of calling for a moratorium on sex-based neuroscience. But consider the deceit on which they're forced to rely.

With regards to brain size, the overlap means that any brain from 1,499 cc to 1,398 is necessarily male and any brain from 1,053 to 975 is necessarily female. So, while we aren't told how the distribution percentages fall, obviously one can tell the sex of 34 percent of the total range.

And if "nearly four-fifths of the traits" showed only minor or negligible differences, that means at least 21 percent of them showed significant differences. Anyone who understands that even a tiny delta can have consequences will understand that far from indicating the irrelevance of sex differences in the brain, this tends to indicate a massive difference in fundamental capabilities.

This is further proof that feminism and equalitarianism are intrinsically anti-science. Their true believers have no choice but to be anti-science, because science is methodically destroying the foundations of their ideologies.

27 comments:

It's interesting that a woman wrote the article. I think her failure to acknowledge the truth as she looks to embrace a world where unicorns can be milked and they crap fairy dust speaks to the truth of the science in question.

I can't read the article s it is unavauilable in my country so I can't tell what study they used to determine the differences in persoanility traits among the sexes, but this study from 2012 says they are quite large.

"A new study confirms that men's minds come from Mars and women's from Venus. In an article recently published in the online journal PLoS ONE, Italian cognitive psychologist Marco Del Giudice and his collaborators compared the personality traits of men and women in a sample of over 10,000 people and found huge differences. Women scored much higher than in men in Sensitivity, Warmth, and Apprehension, while men scored higher than women in Emotional Stability, Dominance, Rule-Consciousness, and Vigilance. When many personality traits were considered simultaneously, there was only a 10% overlap between the distributions of these traits in men and women. Essentially, the study suggests that when it comes to personality men and women belong to two different species."

The Actual study:http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029265

The brain size difference doesn't just tell you definitively about the outliers; you have a probabilistic predictor on any brain volume of what the more likely sex of the brain was. Knowing that something is 85% likely to be a female brain or 85% likely to be a male brain by being nearer the lower portion of the overlap or the higher portion of the overlap, respectively, is knowing something with a quantified error.

It's a rather unenlightened view that requires absolute truth about facts in a world of incomplete information. Then again, math is tough.

This reminds me of the usual liberal widget about race: "Oh, there's more difference within the races than between them!" As if that proves their (presumed) point that races don't exist! Shifting ground supports no solid theories.

Just read Marko Klos' book "Terms of Enlistment". Part way through, I had to check the writers bio to see if he had served in the military (it does mention him having been a soldier). I was simply in disbelief that he had ever served with women in the military from the way way he wrote. Basically, women and men were interchangeable in his work. The only recruit able to keep up with the female drill instructor at an initial push up drill was a woman. The two most dangerous looking members of the main character's squad were women. The military turning a blind eye to fraternization up and down the chain of command.... A well written story that was fairly enjoyable. I just couldn't get past the equalitarian nature to read a sequel. I've reached my quota for new authors and am fast approaching it for established. I then checked the acknowledgements and it read like a list of the Warren from what I have seen over on Vox's other blog. Taking the red pill really lowers your BS tolerance and because there are so many trying to push it on you every day that your lower limit can be reached pretty fast. Perhaps Marko is suffering from being read at the same time as the Ukraine crisis, but I doubt I'll reread his work again.

Leading off with a name like Popular Science is a bad indicator in itself. Like voting to make something a planet or not - science is not about voting. Apparently Popular Science is not really about science.

With regards to brain size, the overlap means that any brain from 1,499 cc to 1,398 is necessarily male and any brain from 1,053 to 975 is necessarily female. So, while we aren't told how the distribution percentages fall, obviously one can tell the sex of 34 percent of the total range.

Likewise with women only earning 70% of what men earn (or whatever the current claim is), you can't tell from an individual's salary whether they are a man or a woman. So there really is no pay gap.

I grew up with Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. They have now both gone definitively over to the Dark Side. And they're not half so much fun. I wonder when, if ever, reality will force them to eat their words, especially on global warming. They trim their "scientific" doctrines to the wind of what they think their readers want to hear.

En-Sigma... I wrote off Popular Science and Popular Mechanics while still in high school in the 1980's, as soon as I realized that they had been publishing variants of the same "flying cars will be here in just a few years now" for the preceding 4 or 5 DECADES.

[It seems none of the people at either magazine are clever enough to figure out that flight requires FAR more power and energy than does rolling, let alone hovering vs. standing at rest....]

It's not long before they try to ban sex-related science. For an ideology that claims to prize 'diversity,' liberalism has an odd way of dealing with it. A nihilistic, totalitarian impulse is what is behind the liberal project to obliterate difference.

You know you've hit the crumbling wall of dogma when they focus on amounts or other items that can be superficially perceived.

That wall crumbles when one trait of that 21%+ is that the competitive/externally organizing neuromapping of men that results in cooperative civilization, and the internal group behavior policing neuromapping of females that results in maintaining tribal barbarism (grass huts, etc.).

It also explains "male" feminists. Just because they were born that way doesn't make them any less funny. Hrm... funny in a number of ways, iffin you ask me.

Oh, right, "science". I am actually amazed to know they continue to do studies, seemingly relatively legitimately, regarding race, sex differences, grobal warbling, and other "settled" science. Where are they getting the funding? Always something I like to ask. Not, in this case, to question it, mostly. As, while I do abide the notions, believe them to be true, I have to wonder who is fighting the heavy tide against truth? Just like to get sideways glances into allied, or potentially allied, camps. Better yet, enemy camps, so I can begin figuring out what their intentions are.

STOP doing Science? STOP seeking the truth? WTF? NO-one saying that should be able to call themselves a scientist. It doesn't matter how "obscure" or "irrelevant" something is, if something is learned, then progress is made and the time was worth it. Prioritising, fine, demanding things stop altogether, not fine.

The second we stop seeking the truth in ANYTHING is when the progression of our entire race stagnates, and we devolve. To demand the stagnation of the human race, purely to save a few hurt feelings is as selfish as you can possibly get.

Small fractions of a percent mean the difference between winning and finishing last in a race. Minor differences can be huge in real life. To claim that the obvious differences between sub-species and genders is illusory shows that Popular Science has fallen to political correctness even more than I had realized. It's been years since I gave them any money, looks like another good decision.

The two most dangerous looking members of the main character's squad were women. The military turning a blind eye to fraternization up and down the chain of command.... A well written story that was fairly enjoyable. I just couldn't get past the equalitarian nature to read a sequel.

Sounds like some of Heinlein's stuff. Putting women in the military is right on par with eating your emergency food when you have the munchies - works great until there's an emergency.

It's not long before they try to ban sex-related science. For an ideology that claims to prize 'diversity,' liberalism has an odd way of dealing with it. A nihilistic, totalitarian impulse is what is behind the liberal project to obliterate difference.

I think this is true. We're not very far from explicit bans on research relating to sex, sexuality, and race.

What about the average brain size of a liberal? I mean, if you use the old-school method of finding volume by pouring sand into a liberal's empty skull... oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself, we were just discussing measurement, not improvement.

...works great until there's an emergency.

I think you've just described most of the modern world. At least for some definitions of "works" and "great".

I'd like to know what the overlap is for use of gray and white matter. As I understand it, mens' brains use far more of one type than the other and vice versa. She can't outrun every difference with appeals to "overlap".

Heh, try imagining the n-dimensional space where each dimension represents one variable describing brain differences between the sexes. May it be the brain size, white-to-gray matter volume ratio, short-to-long distance connections ratio (feel free to add any)... Even with lots of overlap on each separate variable, how much overlap is there between resulting n-dimensional figures? Differences not merely add up, they are multiplied if one tries to envision "the big picture".